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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29673714">a berth on my breast</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastaerd/pseuds/bastaerd'>bastaerd</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Terror (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Comfort No Hurt, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Carnivale, ruminations on leaving things behind</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 00:14:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,909</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29673714</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastaerd/pseuds/bastaerd</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><em>“Anabasis,”</em> Henry said. “Your <em>March of the Ten Thousand.”</em><br/>John pressed his hand. “Yes.”<br/>“I lost it, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, John. I brought it with me, to Carnivale. Couldn’t tell you what compelled me.”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>John Bridgens/Henry "Harry" Peglar</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>36</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>The Terror Bingo</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>a berth on my breast</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>for the <a href="http://theterrorbingo.tumblr.com">terrorbingo</a> prompt <em><strong>Wherever thou goest.</strong></em><br/>title is from the song <em>my bonny boy.</em><br/>gonna be honest, i'm not too sure about this one, lads, but here u go</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The life of a sailor was one filled with departure. By nature of their employment, they spent long months and years away from home, away from their loved ones, sailing to distant ports, and then after some time there and about, it was time yet again to leave. So on, and so forth. One could not habituate himself to attachment. If he did, then it had better be relegated to the sorts of things which came off easily and would not be missed. In lieu of goodbyes, sailors took souvenirs.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Literally, to remember. To come up to the surface of the mind, like a net of fish dragged up to the deck.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The life of a sailor was an impermanent one. They kept their whole lives portable, quick to pack, easy to fit in a single drawer. It meant that what they took, they carried with them, because they could not afford to leave them anywhere else. What they took was important; what they kept was precious.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was easy to keep one’s own inventory, especially when it consisted of so little in terms of material objects. John wondered, sometimes, what he left behind, if anything, in those distant ports. If, among the sweet-smelling air and spray of unfamiliar greenery, woven in with the sound of laughter, there were threads of him, silvery and ephemeral. If, somewhere, there was someone who remembered the sight of an old, tattooed sailor who had come by once and not again. He had never thought himself particularly memorable, not beside the others he knew. Certainly not beside Henry. If ever there was a memorable man, Henry was it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“There you are,” Henry had said to him once, the first time they had spoken together in private, and he had smiled, his eyes creasing at the corners along familiar lines. “You’ve a face to remember,” and he had touched his hand, very gently, only with his little and ring fingers. It had been enough to bind them, John thought. A vein had grown outward from him, down from his chest and out his arm, reaching for a similar line from Henry. They had become vital to one another.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He looked now to the space on the tiny shelf above his bed, the width of one volume and no more. A piece that was not missing, but nor could it be borrowed, since all that was John’s was Henry’s, too. Before this expedition, before Erebus and Terror, they had taken rooms together cheaply, where most found the sea to be ugly, and unpacked their things into the chest of drawers they shared. Henry whistled while John read. Tried to teach him, once, but they discovered him to be dry-lipped and tone-deaf; they had called it a lost cause and laughed about it when the memory surfaced. Nothing borrowed, then, but their time together, stolen from under the nose of a country whose laws forbade them and a Navy who would have them hanged. The day they parted, it was for their respective ships.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Will you be above deck often?” Henry had asked, John’s hand clasped between both of his. He could feel his heartbeat through the palms, and supposed Henry could feel his, too.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, not often,” he had answered him. “But I’ll look for you from any window I can.” He had pulled Henry close by that hand then, placed the other at the nape of his neck and bent his head to kiss his crown. “I’ll look for you, and I’ll say, ‘What light through yonder rigging breaks?’”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Let’s hope the riggings don’t break,” Henry laughed, “or you’ll have to recite a different act.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>John remembered laughing along with him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His berth smelled of smoke, carried on him in the fibers of his clothes from Carnivale. It would take a long while for it to be rid of the scent of burning things. Perhaps he would still be there to tell the difference, or perhaps they will have already walked out by the time it leaves. He ought to be anxious to get rid of it, but that is the strange thing about it-- anything that reminds you that you could have died also reminds you that you lived through it. More than that, it was evidence that John did not make it through on his own. All of them had a bit of smoke clinging to them, even those who had their things washed daily. That would fade, of course, given time, but what fades from the captain and his lieutenant would still remain on the ABs long afterward. The cook, the carpenter. The stewards.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He had not the time to watch the skeleton of Carnivale eat itself and collapse. He had been too busy fighting through the crowd towards any face that might have been Henry’s, ignoring the hammer of his heart inside his ribcage. Felt it leap at the sight of brown hair and the silhouette of a beard, and then felt it fall again when he recognized the man as Lieutenant Irving from Terror. There had been a moment there, between that one and the next, where the thought had come to him in the guise of epiphany that Henry was dead. Might have been one of the bodies he had stepped over in the clamor for the rip in the canvas.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“John?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Henry’s voice was soft as candlelight. He stood beside the half-drawn curtain of the doorway, neither in nor out of John’s cramped quarters. It took a moment before John realized he was waiting there to be told to come in or to go away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>With a hand outstretched, John told him, “Here, Henry,” and guided him inside. They traded places, Henry nearer the bed and John at the doorway to draw the curtain shut. The smell grew stronger now, with the two of them in such close quarters, but had they not survived, there would be no one upon whom for the ashes to cling.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Outside the little space, Erebus was still. Grief and shock silenced the decks as death had failed to do. The remaining men seemed unwilling to shut themselves away, but unable still to hold a conversation. Some sat in the open with blankets over their shoulders; some paced, all but stripped to their linens in an effort to chase away the memory of fire lapping at their backs by inviting the cold in. They all shivered the same way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The bed creaked as Henry sat, and he moved the lamp so as not to cast their shadows against the curtain in an incriminating puppet show. The men outside might not have even noticed, not today, but it was a practice held over from their days on the Gannet. Not having done something for a long while, John noted, did not necessarily drive a habit into extinction. It only meant it had a longer distance to climb to the surface of the mind. He placed himself beside Henry, watching him sidewise, and pulled his hand into the cradle of both of his own. After some time, Henry looked up and pulled a rueful smile at the empty space on John’s shelf.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>“Anabasis,”</span>
  </em>
  <span> he said. “Your </span>
  <em>
    <span>March of the Ten Thousand.”</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>John pressed his hand. “Yes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I lost it, I’m afraid.” Henry bowed his head again, his back bent over like some wilting plant. “I’m sorry, John. I brought it with me, to Carnivale. Couldn’t tell you what compelled me.” There, he coughed a laugh, sharp and self-directed. “It’s lost now. I ought not to’ve brought it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once, in port, John had entertained the idea of finding a copy in the original Greek. He ultimately decided against it, because space was precious and he could not justify purchasing the same book twice, Greek or not, and cramming it into the full shelf in his quarters where another book might otherwise go. Now, he had a spot to fill once more. But he had his Henry beside him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If Henry did not know better than to think him angry for losing the book, it was John’s own failing. He sighed, the wisps of hair which had fallen into his face fluttering on his breath. “That doesn’t matter,” he told him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It was </span>
  <em>
    <span>your</span>
  </em>
  <span> book.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It was </span>
  <em>
    <span>only</span>
  </em>
  <span> a book.” Again, he clasped Henry’s hand, and this time he raised it to his chest, at level with his heart. Henry still bore grey streaks of soot on his cheeks, a blurry dusting of ash caught in his fringe. Before, he had smelled of salt, of sea spray, but they had as good as left the water now. They had their walk to prepare for, and would need to begin packing up what they would require on their journey south. John would walk beside him at every pace. “It was only a book, Henry,” he said again. “It was a good book, but that was all it was.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Henry, his brow furrowed, shook his head. “You’d wanted me to read it,” he said, his thumb brushing along the side of John’s hand. “You were trying to warn me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>John nodded. “Yes.” That he could not come out and say what he had heard, that he had had to tell Henry instead with the words of another man long dead, brought up a well of shame in him. Shame, he found, was another one of those habits not so simply broken. “But now we’ve been warned, and there’s no need to read it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I would’ve liked to,” Henry replied. There was the soft weight of his head as he rested it against John’s shoulder, and John laid his on top so that his cheek sat against the bed of Henry’s hair. “Walking out or not, I’d have liked to read it. I like to read the things you lend me and know that you’ve read those same words yourself before.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His breath tickled John’s collar. He inched closer, and John closer to him, as well, until they were a scant distance from sitting in each other’s laps, and it was still not close enough. John dropped Henry’s hand to wrap one arm around him, folding him against his body and curling himself around him like a snail’s shell. He wanted to pull </span>
  <em>
    <span>Gulliver’s Travels</span>
  </em>
  <span> off the shelf and read it again as an indulgence, as if Henry’s eyes had left troughs in the text that he might be able to discover. More than that, he wanted to keep Henry beside him, selfishly. Wanted to guard the part of his heart that belonged to Henry-- that </span>
  <em>
    <span>was</span>
  </em>
  <span> Henry, made of the same stuff as him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ve no plans of leaving my library here,” John promised him, palm flat against Henry’s back in the warm spot between his shoulders, the place where sweat had dampened his jumper.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As he did so, Henry lifted his head, his lips pinched in what was not quite a smile yet. He watched him like that for a long moment, studying his face as a whole and then kissing him in the way they had not been able when they had found each other in the morning, all red light and sailors’ warning. Between them, their hands caught between their chests, proxies for their beating hearts. “And I’ve no plans of leaving mine,” Henry promised him back, the words warm against John’s lips. “I like to keep him with me wherever the wind takes us.”</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>as usual, find me on <a href="http://edward-little.tumblr.com">tumblr</a>.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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